“Carla was poisoned with cyanide, and they’re saying that the customer did it.”
“Carla?” Marissa was positive that Dan had called her “Carrie.”
“Yeah, the manager at the diner told us that they used fake names so that they wouldn’t be harassed by the customers.”
Marissa knew that could be a problem. On more than one occasion at Kantor’s, sales associates had changed her names on the badges they were forced to wear. It added a layer of anonymity to the process, especially in a world where the customers often thought that a date should accompany a purchase.
The secret name came at a cost. Marissa remembered a certain saleswoman in her cosmetics department who had stolen no less than ten different name tags. Many of the names were identical to those worn by other sales associates at the store. This meant that this woman’s antics would be blamed on other employees. It had worked well for a few months until the surveys that now came at the bottom of every receipt showed that a woman had been working who was off on maternity leave. The deceit had been found out, and the woman had been fired.
Marissa let the matter drop, but she had some ideas to test out before she saw Gavin again.
The next day, she and Ellen went to lunch at Applebee’s in the mall. Ellen was the head of security at Kantor’s at Westgate Mall, and she had recently gotten married to Sergeant Banderra, Gavin’s boss in homicide. Marissa and Ellen had been friends since long before they’d met up again at the store. Her pragmatic way of thinking made her a good sounding board for Marissa’s ideas.
Applebee’s wasn’t particularly crowded so Marissa engaged the waitress in conversation. She thought that the experiment might go better if there was a rapport between them.
The waitress brought them two sodas, putting the decaffeinated soda in front of Ellen and the diet in front of Marissa. She took a long draw on the drink through the straw and made a face. “I’m really sorry, but I think this is regular instead of diet?” Marissa lied. She could taste the slight aftertaste and knew that she’d received the right drink, but she wanted to see how far she could push this experiment. She had no idea if a waitress would drink after a customer. “Try it.” Marissa held the drink out, so that the waitress could take a sip if she wanted.
“No, thanks. I’ll just get you another.” The waitress was off before Marissa could encourage her again. She arrived back with a fresh drink, and Marissa sipped at the soda politely.
“Thanks, sorry to be a bother.”
The waitress flashed her a smile and moved on to the next table, taking their order and moving away to the bar.
“What in the world was that?” Ellen said, trying not to laugh.
“I’m testing a theory,” Marissa said.
“You want to see if the waitress wants to slurp your backwashed soda. I’ll save you the time. The answer is no. I think it’s against the health code to eat someone else’s half-eaten stuff.” She shook her head and took a long sip of her drink.
“I want to see how easy it would be to get a waitress to eat off of your plate. We’re strangers to her, but do you think she’d do it for someone she knows?” Marissa thought about the diner again and wondered about how many people there were regulars who knew the staff well.
When the waitress came back with their plates, Ellen took a French fry and ate it voraciously. “You have to try this,” she said to Marissa. “It’s so good.”
Marissa saw what her friend was trying to do and joined in. She took the fry and savored it. For a second, she wondered what she had to look like to the patrons around her, but she forced those thoughts out of her mind. This was not the time to get embarrassed. “So good.”
Ellen handed a fry to the waitress who just stared at it. “Thanks, but I don’t eat in the dining room. It’s not kosher.”
Marissa looked at her friend. “See! I told you. It’s not going to work.”
Ellen sighed. “You can show me all you want, but it’s not going to convince the police in Columbus. You don’t have Gavin to back you up when you’re there. He has no pull with the Franklin County guys.”
The waitress blanched slightly at the mention of the police. She ran her hand over her apron twice. “Police?” she said finally.
Marissa waved the woman’s fears away. “Not about you. The police are saying that this waitress ate something that was offered to her by a customer, and I’m saying that I just don’t see that happening. For the reasons you say, and a few others.”
Ellen pulled a ten-dollar bill from her wallet and placed it on the table. “For a few minutes of your time, when do you eat here? Or do you?”
The woman looked around, and, apparently seeing no manager lurking, turned back to the two customers. “I try not to—to be honest. There are only so many times that I can see a French dip sandwich before I never want one again.”
“Okay, so what do you do for food?” Ellen asked. She had the curiosity of Nancy Drew.
“Sometimes I pack a lunch. I did that tonight. I made a meal of tuna salad and crackers. I just need something to keep away the stomach rumbles. Nothing turns the customers off more than body noises from the server,” she said with a laugh.
Ellen nodded. “Where do you keep your food? I’m guessing in a refrigerated unit of some sort?”
The waitress smiled. “Yeah, usually with the wine, but other times with the cheese and meats. Just somewhere where it won’t go bad.”
Ellen looked at Marissa. “Could it have been food poisoning? You know, something that she brought from home? Botulism, e. coli?”
Marissa thought that substances like those would have taken a lot more planning than this murderer had shown. “No, it was cyanide. Not the sort of thing that you might pick up accidentally at home.”
Ellen asked, “Do you ever eat off the customer’s plates?”
The girl’s eyes widened. “I’m not going to tell you that. You won’t come back.”
Ellen shrugged. “I think you just did. So do you only eat off certain types of plates?”
The waitress looked around. There was a woman in more formal attire talking to two businessmen at another table. Marissa knew her time was limited with this source of information. “Okay, I’ll tell you, but I’ll deny it to my dying day if you repeat it. Sometimes we take a bit off the plate. Loose stuff, chips, fries, things that aren’t counted. Never baked potatoes or big items, and never a bite out of a sandwich. That would be a dead-giveaway.”
“What about anything else?” Marissa asked, struggling to come away with something helpful.
“I might take an aspirin or a mint from a friend – or maybe something that couldn’t be tampered with. I would never take anything from a man or a total stranger. You could wake up without a kidney,” she said.
Before Marissa could ask another question, the waitress was off to the next table as the manager made her way around to them.
“So there are two more ways that this woman could have been poisoned,” Ellen said smugly. “The food she brought from home could have been tainted with poison.”
“But it would need to be something that masked the taste of the poison.”
“Of course, customers can’t go back to the kitchen area and root around through the packed lunches looking for someone named Carrie or Carla. That would take time and time is the enemy of not being seen. So that would narrow it down to a few potential suspects.”
“I’m guessing that if she had brought something to eat, the police have taken it by now and had it tested.” Marissa’s stomach turned in sympathy at the pain that would accompany cyanide poisoning. It would not be an easy way to go.
“Yes, but she could have eaten the whole thing. Then there might not be enough trace evidence left to help them determine where she got the food. Especially if she rinsed the container out or tossed it into recycling or the trash.”
Marissa felt a bit queasy. This was not the best topic of conversation for a restaurant, but her goal had been to find out how waitresses at
e on the job. That had been accomplished. The first step would be to find out how the cyanide was administered. She knew that Gavin could find that out for her. She wasn’t sure that he’d do it willingly, but he would help.
“What about the second way – eating off someone’s plate?” Marissa said.
“I don’t like that one,” Ellen said. “Not one bit.”
Marissa could see what her friend was thinking. If Carla had eaten off someone’s plate and died, then someone else had been the target of the killer. Someone who was still alive, and someone that the killer still wanted to dispose of. Yet who would go to those lengths to poison one fry or one chip? A few fries or chips would up the odds, but it likely would have meant that someone else would be dead now—and to her knowledge no one had died but Carla. “Still it’s a long shot, don’t you think?” she asked.
“This whole case is a long-shot. Most murder cases are like using a machete to slice a piece of cheese, but this one is different. I’m thinking that the police aren’t going to have an easy time with this one.”
“So someone in the kitchen poisoned the lunch of one of the customers,” Marissa started, but she caught her breath. The moment had gone from an exercise in deduction to realizing that Zach had been one of the patrons that day. He certainly wasn’t the intended target, and neither was Dan. His food had never arrived, meaning that Carla could never have eaten off of it before serving it to the table. Cyanide worked fast, but not instantaneously. If Carla had eaten off a plate, it had likely occurred a few tables before her collapse.
She made a mental note to call Dan and ask who was served before Zach and the waitress’s collapse. He’d been a thoughtful witness so far. Marissa wondered what else he’d come up with.
She and Ellen left a huge tip for the waitress and headed back to the department store and the late afternoon rush.
However, Marissa didn’t need to call Dan about the question. When she checked her phone after lunch, she had two missed calls from him. She was concerned enough to call him back immediately. Dan rarely called her and even more infrequently made calls from work.
“Dan, I just got your message. What’s up?”
“I never thought I’d say this but I need your help.” His voice was fast and breathy. Marissa wondered what had brought this on.
“Let me hear what the problem is first—before I sign on to anything,” she said. Dan’s favor could be anything from borrowing a towel to renegotiating child support. She didn’t grant favors to this man without careful consideration.
“The DA called me today. Since I was at the scene of the crime, he wanted me to testify for the prosecution in the case against the young mother from the diner, but after he heard what I had to say he sounded upset.” Dan’s voice broke a little at the end of the sentence.
“What am I supposed to do about this? Just tell the truth,” Marissa said.
“You could figure out who killed this woman. You’re good at solving problems like this. It would be so much easier on me. I don’t do well when I’m under pressure.”
Marissa knew that was true. All anyone had to do was rattle his cage a little, and Dan would have confessed to the Ripper killings if he got to escape confrontation. He would definitely not do well on the stand, if the prosecution wanted to go after him.
Marissa also didn’t want to spend too much time on the phone with Dan anyway, so she agreed to look into a few things for him. Or solve the crime, she thought as she hung up the phone.
She wasn’t too concerned about stepping on the police’s toes in this matter. If they had arrested someone for the crime and were rounding up witnesses, the police must want to clear the case badly. To their minds, the case was all but closed.
She made a call to Gavin and asked if he could find out anything new about the case. She went to the Columbus Dispatch’s website to see out what she could learn. However, Marissa knew that in this time of cutbacks and layoffs, she couldn’t trust the newspaper to provide all the details.
A quick search brought her to the article she wanted. The family of the accused had come forward for an in-depth and exclusive interview with the paper. They wanted to assure the city that their mother was innocent.
Marissa immediately remembered that Dan had talked about a family at lunch and a single woman. So she immediately knew who was accused here. The people who had sat closest to the door.
Apparently Carla had been known to the Bishop family. She’d babysat for the kids in the past, and she’d lived on the same street as the Bishops until she’d rented a place with a couple of roommates in the Short North area of the city. Marissa was impressed that a waitress could afford the apartments there, even with roommates, because that was a highly desirable part of town, surrounded by art galleries and upscale eateries. How could she afford that on a waitress’s salary?
The case against the mother came down to this: The police believed that Mr. Bishop and Carla had been having an affair. One of Carla’s roommates had identified him as one of the men who came to visit Carla. His family had denied the claim until his DNA had been found in Carla’s apartment. Now a family spokesperson was on record as saying that Mrs. Bishop hadn’t known about the affair.
The husband said, “I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I was careful to make sure that she didn’t know about Carla.”
Marissa took a deep breath. She does now. Marissa thought about her own divorce. As much as Dan had hurt her, she had never wanted him dead. Her mind didn’t work that way. Maybe that was why she liked solving crimes, because obviously there were other people out there who did think that way.
The family was sticking to the story that the mother hadn’t known. A photograph accompanying the article showed two kids looking forlorn and huddled under an apricot tree. The paper had gone for pathos, so Marissa suspected that they were hard-pressed for real information. Emotional arguments were the fallback position when you couldn’t prove something.
The newspaper article did mention that Carla had died of cyanide poisoning. Marissa had been curious about that, because dangerous poisons weren’t just handed out like supplements. She thought back to the Victorian times when toxins could be purchased with a signature—and often it was impossible to identify the poison after it was administered. How different life was now. People still used poison to kill, but it was hard to buy and easy to trace.
The police believed that the cyanide had not been commercially made. It had been a home-brew. Marissa knew from her conversations with Gavin that some poisons could be made from simple household materials. She had actually solved a case where the killer had distilled nicotine from cigarettes.
Given that a large photo of an apricot tree accompanied the article, Marissa wondered if she was staring at the source of the toxin. Apricot seeds could be converted to cyanide. Marissa vaguely remembered Gavin talking about an attempted murder where the would-be killer had used apricot seeds. Yet she had never seen an apricot tree in Ohio. Surely that alone was enough to raise suspicions.
The police had found beakers and other scientific equipment at the house, but the paraphernalia had no traces of cyanide on it. The father had said that their oldest son was into chemistry.
Marissa knew that no mother would cook up a batch of deadly poison at home and hope for the best. After spending a lifetime keeping dangerous things out of their hands, Marissa couldn’t believe that a mother would expose her children to something as deadly as cyanide.
Marissa let out a sigh of relief. The case against Mrs. Bishop was circumstantial at best. The affair was likely important and might be something to investigate, but certainly the apricot to cyanide relationship could apply to anyone who shopped at Kroger.
~*~
That evening, Gavin brought over several photocopied pages and a few scribbled notes pulled from a pad of paper. “Here you go. This is what I could get without attracting any attention. I don’t think that anyone would be pleased to hear that someone thinks the accused is innocent.” He gave
her a brief kiss.
“Then don’t tell them,” she said as she thumbed through the pages. The first page was a summary of the autopsy. Carla had ingested a healthy dose of cyanide, source unknown. There was tea and a trace of an unidentified substance in her stomach, but the coroner was not certain how the drug was administered. There were no signs of a puncture wound or needle.
The dearth of information made Marissa immediately suspicious. “Won’t this be asked at trial?” she asked, pointing on the page and holding it out to Gavin.
He shrugged. “Probably, but juries are funny. Give them motive and opportunity, and they won’t care about the details. You’d be surprised.”
She’d made it through the first page when something else caught her eye. “They keep saying that it’s homemade poison and not production. How do they know that?”
Gavin looked at her. “I guess dinner’s waiting then?”
“Just a few questions, and I’ll let you decide,” Marissa responded. Gavin was notoriously picky as an eater, so he would be somewhat mollified that he could select the restaurant. Marissa just hoped it wasn’t a diner.
“Okay, Mitchell’s Fish Market,” he said, naming a seafood place down on the river. Marissa was okay with fish, but it wasn’t her favorite. Eating seafood next to one of the filthiest rivers in the country always made her leery of what she was eating.
“Fine, now about the poison?” she asked. “How do they know how it was made?”
“Most commercially produced cyanide has other identifiable ingredients in it. So when the tox testing was done, they ran a test for those ingredients as well. They didn’t show up, which led them to believe that the stuff was homemade.”
Marissa gave him a kiss. “I know you well enough that you found out all the details. Tell me on the way to the restaurant.”
Gavin always complained when they met at her house, since she lived on the western side of Cincinnati, meaning that only three major streets exited the labyrinthine neighborhoods to the highway. They would have plenty of time to talk before getting to Mitchell’s.
Happy Homicides 4: Fall Into Crime: Includes Happy Homicides 3: Summertime Crimes Page 93